How to leverage a movement

Movement marketing: Scoot Goodson on how to leverage a movement

Scott Goodson, the Montreal-born founding partner of international agency StrawberryFrog, explores the phenomenon of “movement marketing” in his new book Uprising: How to Build a Brand — and Change the World — by Sparking Cultural Movements. Mr. Goodson co-owned an agency in Sweden for 10 years before working as executive creative director at JWT Canada in the late 1990s and founded StrawberryFrog in Amsterdam in 1999. He later opened offices in New York and São Paulo. He recently spoke with Hollie Shaw from Seoul, Korea about how marketers can leverage and enhance widespread social and cultural movements.

QWhat is movement marketing?

A It starts with focusing on everything and anything but the product. It is focusing on an idea out there in society, out there in culture and tying the idea back to the brand purpose or brand benefit.

It’s about what is going on out there that is relevant to people. If you look at it from a brand marketing perspective, it is not about starting with a product and coming up with some kind of creative marketing way of expressing the product. With movement marketing, you first start with an idea that is relevant to a really big group of people out there in culture. Then you cleverly, and with authenticity, tie it back to the brand.QHow does movement marketing fit into a big brand’s overall mix of advertising and marketing?

A A movement is really an organized community of passionate advocates who rally around an idea in the rising culture to change the world in some way. I think Dove [Campaign for Real Beauty] is a perfect example. They took an idea out there that women were feeling about the old French cosmetic culture.

While many women love that type of marketing — making you feel bad about your body, using imagery that was highly aspirational — many other women felt it didn’t reflect reality. There was a frustration that existed. What Dove did in that particular case was it crystallized an idea that women were feeling and stood up to that culture and rallied everyone against that culture, and by doing so created a movement to change something. It was an idea that was relevant to every woman and it just exploded. The benefit of a movement in that case is clear — it is shareable content, free media, sustainable marketing compared with a television ad that you have to pay to create awareness and when you stop paying it disappears.

Movement marketing should in essence be sustainable — once you put it out there, it continues to grow.

QDo you have a favourite example of movement marketing?

A Think Small, the VW campaign that was done in the U.S. in the 1960s, really crystallized an idea that was out there in the culture, which was that people were fed up with Detroit. It was an idea about a philosophy and a way of living and people just flocked to it. Nike was the next. Steve Jobs [of Apple] had talked about how his yardstick was “Just Do It.” in following what Nike did in order to have a point of view on the world, and create a brand that connected to people in a much more relevant way than just an ad.

QWhat movements have you worked on?

A A lot of different ones. One for IKEA was a movement [based on the idea that] not only the rich should enjoy beautiful furniture, but that everyone should. It was like we were trying to do something more meaningful than selling people stuff. We tackled all sorts of social issues. We did a movement for Smart Car last year in the U.S.

When the great recession happened we felt that there was a strong movement against excess in America, and against mass overconsumption. So we declared a movement against dumb – big, mass overconsumption. We went from being a fuel-efficient car to becoming a brand that was part of creating a movement against excess. And sales went up – 172% the first month, 200% the second month.

QDoes movement marketing ever fail? Are there some brands or companies that are not suited to movement marketing?

A Idealistically, I believe everyone could create a movement — I think companies and organizations need to find a way of doing it in a relevant way. I interviewed the [chief marketing officer] at Pepsi as Refresh (a marketing promotion, which donated money to people’s world-bettering projects) was going though the last quarter of its life. I think [Pepsi] was on to something really big there, but in that particular case it was very difficult to connect. Some people have said that the connection of a soft drink to try to simply fund social change is potentially not authentic. My personal feeling is — we try to rely on the financial industry to make the world a better place and we rely on governments to make the world a better place. Industry can make the world a better place. I don’t think Pepsi is wrong in its ambition to do that. I think the way it is framed needs to be thought through. Capitalism does work and create jobs and it can change the world.

Businesses of all sizes really can mobilize people to tackle big huge challenges by doing what they do best — by delivering products and services that people need and by finding enterprising solutions to problems.